Now and then my mind goes wandering into the dark lanes of memory, and begins to open and turn over the little bundles of bygone days — of things that happened, things that were lived. The strange part is that the moment a bundle is loosed, some old event slips out of its subtle form and begins, on the screen of the mind, to play out its spectacle like an old silent film, familiar faces flashing before the eyes. Once, out of one such bundle, there sprang to life the bustle of a Farmers' Conference held in the years 1948–49, in an open hollow at a town called Tikri on the Jammu–Udhampur road. Tikri must be some forty, forty-two kilometres from Jammu city. I have no connection at all with the work of farming; but at that time the Dogri institution of Jammu came to have an important connection with that Farmers' Conference. We had heard of the conference from Comrade Dhanvantri. And how that came about is a story of its own.
Some four years had passed since the founding of the Dogri institution at Jammu. In that span, a few of the companions who had shared in founding it would come and sit beneath the tall eucalyptus at the southern end of the Parade Ground, or in the outer circumambulatory of the Dewan's temple, and grieve aloud that, toward the very purpose for which we had founded the institution, we had not yet been able to make a single move. We had the ache in our hearts and the heart to strive; but we had neither the means we needed, nor any settled place to sit and deliberate. One day, sitting there, the institution's president, Pandit Sansar Chand-ji, suggested that two of us should go to Comrade Dhanvantri — who lived in Kalijani, Jammu — and take his counsel on how to carry the institution's work forward. Comrade Dhanvantri had himself been born in Jammu, and had studied up to the tenth class at the Shri Ranbir High School there. For further study he went off to Lahore. At that time, though a college named "Prince of Wales" had started up in Jammu, the science subjects were taught neither at the Ranbir High School nor at this college as yet; to study science, students had to go to Lahore or Amritsar. Comrade Dhanvantri's father, Colonel Durgadatt Mahay, was a doctor in the state forces, and had his own permanent house in the Kalijani locality of Jammu. Of Colonel (Dr.) Durgadatt Mahay's three sons, Comrade Dhanvantri was the youngest. His eldest brother, Shri Bhimsen Mahay, having passed the Law examinations, had become a Judge in the Judiciary department.
Comrade Dhanvantri went to Lahore and first passed the F.Sc. from the D.A.V. College there, and after that began to take an interest in the Congress movement against the bondage of foreign imperialism. He could not go on to his B.Sc. In its place he enrolled in the D.A.V. Ayurvedic College, passed the two examinations of Kaviraj and Vaidya Vachaspati, and, renting a shop in a Lahore lane, set up an Ayurvedic practice. While at work in that medicine shop, his acquaintance with revolutionaries like Sardar Bhagat Singh grew, and Dhanvantri too became an active member of the revolutionary party. The thrilling story of Comrade Dhanvantri Mahay's life-struggle is a long one, steeped in great hardship. In brief: Dhanvantri, having passed his matriculation in 1919, went off to Lahore, and through that revolutionary struggle spent twelve to fourteen years in imperialist jails — of which four were served in the dreaded "kalapani" prison of the Andamans. After the people's government came to power in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and annulled the feudal-era ban on his entering the state, he returned to his Jammu home in November 1947.
Master Sansar Chand knew Comrade Dhanvantri, and so the two of us went to his house in Kalijani to talk with him about the Dogri institution. When Dhanvantri had come back to Jammu from prison, he was very weak — his body worn to ruin by the hardships of jail. Having led so many years of such a struggle, Dhanvantri had never once thought of marriage. In Kalijani, his eldest brother Shri Vishwamitra and his family lived with him; the house was fairly large, and Dhanvantri slept and sat in a separate room there, and there too received all who came to meet him. When we entered, he was very pleased. We spoke with him only in Dogri; Dhanvantri carried on the discussion with us in Punjabi. He said:
"I was about to send you a message."
"Was there some work?" Master-ji asked.
"On the Jammu–Udhampur road there is a hill town called Tikri," he said. "Two months from now it has been settled to hold a Farmers' Conference there. Many farmers are expected from the country around Tikri and as far off as Bamhag. You are anxious about a programme for the Dogri institution. Could some Dogri play be staged at this conference of Dogra farmers, taking for its theme the sacrifice of the immortal peasant, Bawa Jitto? If it could, then for one thing the splendour and renown of the conference would be the greater; and for another, the work of the Dogri institution would have a solid beginning."
Master Sansar Chand and I came out of Comrade Dhanvantri Mahay's house. Master-ji looked at me and said, "How deep, how full of meaning is Comrade Dhanvantri's thinking."
"It is a most meaningful suggestion of his," I said. "But none of us has any experience of writing a play. And about Bawa Jitto, neither is his Karak — his ballad — in print, nor is any material to be found in print about his life and his times. Dhanvantri has set us a hard challenge. If we accept defeat at this very first one, then how shall we ever carry the journey ahead through, on so rough a road?"
In brief: an inexperienced writer like me, on the strength of enthusiasm and effort alone, wrote a plain, simple Dogri play of two and a half hours; and some eager but untrained village lads — little schooled, or not schooled at all — after ten or fifteen days of rehearsal, presented it on the stage one evening of that conference, by the light of petromax lamps. The ministers of the state's people's government — Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the Deputy Prime Minister; Sardar Budh Singh, Minister of Information and Broadcasting; Girdhari Lal Dogra, the Finance Minister — and Comrade Dhanvantri, and the chief organiser of the conference, Thakur Karnail Singh of Tikri, and the people of the surrounding villages, and the young farmers who had come from as far as Bamhag, being devotees of Bawa Jitto, all watched the play with keen interest. Comrade Dhanvantri gave his blessing to the artists who staged it. I am quite sure that Thakur Trilok Singh Chanasia of Tikri must have watched it too — though at that time the workers of the Dogri institution had no real acquaintance with him.
Because of the help Thakur Karnail Singh of Tikri gave us in preparing and staging the play, he became a very close collaborator and friend of ours. About the play I think it necessary to tell readers this much too: that in it, written upon the life of Bawa Jitto, much importance was given to his family life. The character of Bawa Jitto's wife, Maya, was played by a fair, slim lad from the village of Painthal; and in the role of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Gauri, the scenes — in keeping with her childlike nature — of her playing marbles and gotis, pleased the people greatly. The scene of the quarrel that broke out between the oppressor, the jagirdar Bir Singh, and the hill peasant Jitto over the division of his harvest, was quite powerful too. But at the end, when Jitto enacted the plunging of his dagger into his own breast, and the deep red of the wad of red-dyed cotton hidden inside young Jitto's white waistcoat soaked through and spread across the white cloth, a thick silence fell over the simple peasant-spectators. On that very scene our play ended. I was standing, at the time, behind the curtain of stitched-together blue sheets on the stage, reading from the register and prompting; and a lad stood behind me, throwing the light of a torch onto the register.
The next day, the young farmers who had come from far and near to the conference talked happily with those lads of our theatre-troupe who had acted in the play the night before. They had come to believe that the times had truly changed. Why else would these state ministers, officials, and leaders speak with us, and share our joys and sorrows? And this too was a marvel to them — that "until now, in our villages, the boys would put on a Ramlila just once a year; but at this conference, this play of the sacrifice of Bawa Jitto! In the days of the old rulers, who would ever have let such a play be staged — one that brought the landlords and jagirdars low?"
At this same Tikri conference the Dogri institution presented one more item of great importance. The institution owned some twenty genuine paintings of Pahari art, and Pandit Sansar Chand had brought them to Tikri as well. The local chief organiser, Thakur Karnail Singh, had a shop right at the road's edge emptied for us to display them, and we hung the paintings on its front wall. The frame of an old, broken-down motor lay before it, at the roadside. Pandit Sansar Chand asked me to stand upon it and call out, inviting the farmers to come and see this exhibition of Pahari art. What I said, standing there, I remember nothing of today; but Karnail Singh fully made good the work of carrying my invitation about. In those days the traffic on the road was sparse, and among simple peasants too there is a kind of herd-instinct. Master Sansar Chand, standing on a wooden box inside the shop, gave an account of the paintings — of their colours, and of the painters who had made them.
That shop, those paintings hung in it, and the simple peasants who came to see them — I have not forgotten them to this day. That first small exhibition of Dogra-Pahari painting was the first tender bud of the "Dogra Art Gallery" which, some years on, was established in the Gandhi Bhawan of Jammu, and inaugurated by the hand of the first President of independent India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad.
Because of that farmers' conference, Tikri became a most important centre of the literary work of the Dogri institution at Jammu. We went there three or four times; and with Trilok Singh we also saw the place he called Darea-Badd, which some local people call "Lade-Ladi da Dhak" — the Slope of the Bridegroom and the Bride. At this place, once, in the summer season, a poor lad from the village of Kola used to do the work of giving water to the people coming and going along the road. And it was here that the event befell by which that water-bearing lad met his death — having gone far down, filled a gagar of water, and climbed back up the slope without once pausing.
At that spot, in those days, there lay — one upon another — a palanquin fashioned out of sandy stone, and a pile of stone pots of the kind given in a bride's dowry. A wedding party, coming along that road, halted at the place called Darea-Badd to drink water. The bridegroom and many of his party were thirsty, and all fell greedily to drinking, so that the two gagars of water were soon emptied. At that very moment the bride, seated in the palanquin and distressed by the heat, lifted its curtain, peeped out, and said to her attendant, "Go, bring water for me too — my throat has gone dry."
The water-bearing lad saw the bride asking for water, her face out at the palanquin's edge. As he lifted a gagar and was about to set off down the thin footpath cut into that steep slope, the young bridegroom, by way of a taunt, said to him: "Lad — if you go down this footpath with the empty gagar and come back up at the same speed with it full, without stopping or resting, then the bride is yours."
The bridegroom's foolish companions roared with laughter. The water-bearing lad had already gone far down the path. The bridegroom and his friends, standing at the top of that fearful slope, watched the lad come climbing swiftly back up the same thin footpath, the gagar of water raised on his shoulder. He was drenched in sweat, he was out of breath — but he gained the top. He set the gagar down beside his earthen jar, stood up straight once — and the next instant fell flat upon the ground with a crash. His life had gone out of him. An uproar arose.
The bride came out of the palanquin. Gathering her party, she came and stood by the lad's body. Some wise elder counselled her, "Don't stay here now. Come — the bridegroom has lost face." The attendant told her to take her seat in the palanquin. The bride looked at her and said, "My palanquin has reached its destination. The rest of you, go. This lad has shown that he kept his vow. How, then, shall I break mine? How shall I break the word of one who, having walked the seven sacred rounds of the fire with me, brought me this far? At the speed with which this lad went down with the gagar, with that same speed he came back up with it full. He" — she pointed toward the bridegroom — "fulfilled his condition. Now I shall fulfil the second thing he said. I have no bond left with that man; my marriage to him was joined and broken in a single instant."
Trembling with rage, the bridegroom seized the bride by the arm and dragged her toward the palanquin. She wrenched her arm free and said in anger, "Look — lay no hand on me! You and I have no bond now!"
As she turned to go, having said this, the bridegroom caught her by the hair and dragged her over the stones of the rough path. The bride, already parched with thirst, died of being dragged so over the stones.
People came there from all the villages around. Hearing the whole of it, they built a pyre and cremated the two bodies together. By whom that palanquin of sandy stone and that pile of dowry-pots were made there, and when those artistic mementoes — witnesses to the event — were fashioned, God alone knows.
At this very place, and beyond it toward Tikri, finding some pleasant, cool spot in a grove, we held several literary gatherings.
On the 16th of October, 1977, under the institution's programme titled "The Search for the Unwritten History of Duggar," we held what was perhaps our last programme at Tikri — a seminar, in which Thakur Trilok Singh read a deeply researched historical essay titled "Tikri-Chanas." That essay was published, together with two other research essays of the same series, in the 43rd issue (March 1978) of the institution's quarterly, Nami Chetna. Beginning it, Trilok Singh Chanasia had written: "It is our greatest good fortune that the respected and esteemed intellectuals and thinkers of Duggar — who have set on foot this praiseworthy plan of researching the unwritten history of the Dogras — have today graced this place, Tikri, with their presence. We are deeply grateful to them. Today, where all you gentlemen are gathered, a century ago people called this whole place Chanas. In that time this Chanas was the royal seat of a domain of 84 villages of Bhalwalta and the 22 streams of Bamhag. Today it has shrunk once more to a mere hamlet."